Hollywood has a real problem with respecting its audience’s intelligence. Earlier this summer, Disney released a soulless carbon copy of a 10-year-old movie and expected none of us to notice. The Odyssey has a scene where Matt Damon’s Odysseus says, with a completely straight face, “Our age of bronze is collapsing.” He might as well have said, “We’re in the period from the late 13th to early 12th century BC that historians will come to know as Late Bronze Age collapse.”

Netflix is one of the worst offenders; they famously have their characters state their motivations out loud, and describe every plot point in real time, so that viewers who are staring at their phones can still follow the story. In their recent horror film The Last House, Netflix had one man who was trapped in his house, writing messages to his neighbors, read every single message aloud — not just the ones he was reading, but the ones he was writing, too. Stranger Things’ early seasons let subtlety and subtext be a thing, but the later seasons have pages and pages of dialogue overexplaining the machinations of the plot for inattentive audiences.

Netflix’s penchant for dumbing down its content and pandering to the least attentive viewers has gotten a lot worse in recent years. When Netflix first started making original programming, it was considered a serious competitor to prestige TV factories like HBO and AMC. Early hits like House of Cards and Orange is the New Black were mentioned in the same breath as Breaking Bad and Mad Men and Game of Thrones.

Between Narcos and Ozark and BoJack Horseman, Netflix used to make shows for smart people. Mindhunter was one of the last great Netflix shows not to underestimate its audience’s intelligence and overexplain the themes and ideas at play.

Mindhunter Trusted Its Audience

David Fincher is one of the finest filmmakers in Hollywood. His meticulous attention to detail has earned him a reputation as the modern-day Hitchcock — he managed to make a movie about the invention of Facebook riveting — and one of the best things about his work is that he respects his audience’s intelligence. He trusts audiences to get what he’s going for with the ambiguous ending of Se7en; he trusts them to make up their own minds about the complicated moral dilemmas of Gone Girl.

In 2017, Fincher turned his cinematic eye to the small screen and brought Joe Penhall’s crime thriller series Mindhunter to life on Netflix. Based on the true-crime book of the same name by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, Mindhunter stars Jonathan Groff, Holt McCallany, and Anna Torv as three FBI agents who essentially create the concept of a serial killer in the late 1970s and early 1980s. As they start to notice disturbing patterns in the behavior of mass murderers, they found the Behavioral Science Unit.

Fincher was very hands-on with the series — it wasn’t just a meaningless “executive producer” credit; he was the show’s most prolific director, and basically acted as its showrunner behind the scenes — and it shows in Mindhunter’s meticulous construction. Above all, Mindhunter trusted its audience to understand that this isn’t a traditional detective show, but rather an exploration of the psychological aspects involved in a serial killer investigation. It’s more about the mental toll of examining these horrific crimes as a nine-to-five than it is about police procedures.

The supporting cast is a veritable who’s-who of early serial killers, ranging from Charles Manson to the Son of Sam, but it’s not about assembling an Avengers squad of serial killers. Mindhunter is one of the most profound TV masterpieces of the past decade, and it deserved a lot better than an early cancellation after two seasons.

Mindhunter

10/10

Release Date

2017 – 2019

Network

Netflix

Showrunner

Joe Penhall

Directors

David Fincher, Carl Franklin, Andrew Dominik, Andrew Douglas, Asif Kapadia, Tobias Lindholm